Wednesday, October 30, 2013

The Persistence of Memory

First shown at the Julien Levy Gallery in
1932, the painting has been in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art
(MoMA) in New York City since 1934. It is widely recognized and frequently referenced in
popular culture.

The Persistence of Memory is by far
Salvador Dali’s most recognizable painting, and there are many references to it
in popular culture. Although it was conjectured that the soft melting watches
were the result of Dali’s interpretation of the theory of relativity, Dali
himself state that their inspiration was camembert cheese melting under the
sun. The sequence of melting clocks in a disjointed landscape is the depiction
of a dream that Dali had experienced, the figure in the middle of the painting
being the face of the dreamer himself. The general interpretation is that the
painting, which portrays many melting watches, is a rejection of time as a
solid and deterministic influence.

This
iconic and much-reproduced painting depicts time as a series of melting watches
surrounded by swarming ants that hint at decay, an organic process in which
Dali held an unshakeable fascination. Elaborated in the frontispiece to the
Second Surrealist Manifesto, the seminal distinction between hard and soft
objects, associated by Dali with order and putrefaction respectively, informs
his working method in subverting inherent textual properties: the softening of
hard objects and corresponding hardening of soft objects. It is likely that
Dali was using the clocks to symbolize mortality (specifically his own) rather
than literal time, as the melting flesh in the painting's center is loosely
based on Dali's profile. The cliffs that provide the backdrop are taken from
images of Catalonia, Dali's home.